Author Archives: admin

Infected Marketing

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B2B marketers could learn a lot from influenza. Actually, they would learn from Walgreens and their annual flu shots.  A few weeks back I received snail mail from Walgreens, the chain pharmacy which I haphazardly selected last year to get my annual influenza inoculation.  In the envelope was a colorful reminder about flu season and the fact I could get an injection, the location and hours of the closest store, a sheet detailing the hazards of catching the flu and the inoculation forms already filled out with the info I provided the previous year. This helps explain why Walgreens’ return on equity, investment and assets are higher than competing CVS and why their stock price is doing better as well. Promotions need to provide a sense of urgency, a solution and then ease the path to acquiring the product.  Walgreens did all that in one mailer.  Their literature reminded me … Continue reading →

Shift Happens

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A start-up client of mine maintains an interesting page on their intranet that showed when employees typically come and go.  The CEO routinely arrives at the office around 8:00AM, the software architect by 10:00AM, and their hotshot Java geek leaves the building at o-dark-thirty. Technology is shifting time.  In the bad old days (say 1998) lives were regimented.  Between work and television, most Americans kept static and well matched schedules.  Most everyone was at work at nine, home by six, integrated with their couch by eight and using Jay Leno as a nightlight for foreplay around midnight.  Lives between people were synchronized out of practice and the necessity of both communing at work and the nature of broadcasting. Technology has made work life at the start-up asynchronous and may well spell the death of broadcasting as we know it (expect the water cooler phrase “Did you catch blah-blah-blah on TV … Continue reading →

Apotheker Approach

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“If you liked Hurd,” began the email from an HP employee, “Then you’re going to love Leo!” Yes, it was sarcasm on his part. Mark Hurd was a darling with Wall Street and a demon to HP employees.  Hurd did what imported CEOs often do, which is cut expenses by cutting employees and burning deadwood.  HP employees lived under unemployment fears but HP’s bottom line improved.  Some souls who still fondly remember Bill and Dave and a kinder, gentler and more stable HP didn’t much care for Hurd (or Carly for that matter).  Where as HP once stood for innovation and nearly family-style employee relations, it now more closely resembled Oracle in its ruthlessness. So it surprised nobody in HP that Hurd landed at Oracle after HP auditors found a soft-core porn star on Hurd’s expense report. What HP staffers and the larger tech and investment communities were surprised about … Continue reading →

Developing Droids

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Android is the next MS-DOS. I am not consigning Android to the landfill of technology history.  In fact I am predicting that Android may well become the de facto personal computing architecture of the (near) future.  My prognostication are not divine nor demented, nor are they a technologist’s religious rhetorical report.  This is pure marketing led by the second most important part of the marketing mix:  the people that provide product. In this case, programmers. Repeating myself — as I am too fond of doing — people buy operating systems to run applications.  Applications achieve things and the OS exists for no other reason than to facilitate applications.  Thus platform wars are won by having a large set of applications that work well together (or at least don’t drop-kick one another into inoperability) and thus increase the likelihood that any end user will find the solution/application for which he/she/it is … Continue reading →

Android Aggression

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America used to beg for immigrants, because the joint was big and there was plenty of room and opportunity to go around. Kinda like the Android market. IDC caused Steve Jobs to dance a jig (not a pretty sight) when they predicted that the smart phone market would grow by 55.4% this year, a full 10% more than they had last prognosticated.  Steve could hear cash registers ringing at every Apple store with thoughts of iPhones flying out the doors.  IDC then caused Jobs to change underpants midday when they also predicted that Android and Windows phones would lead this surge in sales through 2014. Cachet casts a short shadow. IDC thinks Android smart phones will comprise nearly 25% of units within two election cycles (and can we just call them ‘phones’ since they will be the market by 2014).  Windows phones are estimated to take a relatively paltry 9.8% … Continue reading →

Televised Apocalypse

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Google is proving an old joke right, and in the right way. The joke was that UNIX is the original computer virus, spreading like an epidemic to every conceivable computing platform.  Geeks used to laugh at this line … until Linux was first spotted running side-by-side on both a surplus x86 desktop and an IBM mainframe.  It then leapt onto cell phones, into routers, and I think there is a Linux application for my toaster. It may in your next television. Samsung — whose cell phone division likes Android in the same way sumo wrestlers like cheeseburgers — let slip that they are considering baking Android into televisions.  This is no meager moment because Samsung makes more idiot boxes than the public school system makes viewers.  In fact, Samsung make more boob tubes than any other enterprise, and is single handedly responsible for most of the traffic on Best Buy’s … Continue reading →

Frictionless Clouds

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Sometimes technology is wholly too complex, a fact that HP has latched onto. In all product marketing, one pays attention to the ‘whole product‘, which is the sum of all the expected outcomes from using a product (this is a combination of features, benefits, services, price points, etc.)  Whole products are different for each market, each segment and each buyer genotype. Taken as a whole, a whole technology product can be very complex, and the complexity grows as the number of targeted segments grows. Technology isn’t for wimps. Thus, there is often a trade-off between a whole product and the product suited for new users (who can be considered a subsegment).  Often part of a whole product is offered as another whole product, but to a market or segment that is less sophisticated than buyers in the larger group.  Another common trick is to grease the skids for implementing a … Continue reading →